Shakespeare S Roman Plays And Their Background

"Shakespeare's Roman plays and their background" by Mungo William Sir MacCallum. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

Is there a specificity to adapting a Roman play to the screen ? This volume interrogates the ways directors and actors have filmed and performed the Shakespearean works known as the "Roman plays", which are, in chronological order of writing, Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. In the variety of plays and story lines, common questions nevertheless arise. Is there such a thing as filmic "Romanness"? By exploring the different ways in which the Roman plays are re-interpreted in the light of Roman history, film history and the Shakespearean tradition, the papers in this volume all take part in the ceaseless investigation of what the plays keep saying not only about our vision of the past, but also about our perception of the present.

First published in 1989. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Paul A. Cantor first probed Shakespeare’s Roman plays—Coriolanus, Julius Caeser, and Antony and Cleopatra—in his landmark Shakespeare’s Rome (1976). With Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy, he now argues that these plays form an integrated trilogy that portrays the tragedy not simply of their protagonists but of an entire political community. Cantor analyzes the way Shakespeare chronicles the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and the emergence of the Roman Empire. The transformation of the ancient city into a cosmopolitan empire marks the end of the era of civic virtue in antiquity, but it also opens up new spiritual possibilities that Shakespeare correlates with the rise of Christianity and thus the first stirrings of the medieval and the modern worlds. More broadly, Cantor places Shakespeare’s plays in a long tradition of philosophical speculation about Rome, with special emphasis on Machiavelli and Nietzsche, two thinkers who provide important clues on how to read Shakespeare’s works. In a pathbreaking chapter, he undertakes the first systematic comparison of Shakespeare and Nietzsche on Rome, exploring their central point of contention: Did Christianity corrupt the Roman Empire or was the corruption of the Empire the precondition of the rise of Christianity? Bringing Shakespeare into dialogue with other major thinkers about Rome, Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy reveals the true profundity of the Roman Plays.